What shocks me the most about this is that hardly anyone seems to care. It’s seen as “normal”, as “business as usual” that a quarter of the world’s investment banking system is owned by white-collar criminals. When the issue is even brought up, often the complaint seems to be that the government is being somehow overzealous. The Economist even went so far as to characterize the prosecution of Wall Street fraud as a “shakedown”. Apparently the idea that our world’s most profitable companies shouldn’t be able to launder money for terrorists is just ridiculous. These are rich people; you expect them to follow rules? What is this, some kind of democracy?

Is this just always how it has been? Has corruption always been so thoroughly infused with finance that we don’t even know how to separate them? Has the oligarchy of the top 0.01% become so strong that we can’t even bring ourselves to challenge them when they commit literal treason? For, in case you’ve forgotten, that is what money-laundering for terrorists is: HSBC gave aid and comfort to the enemies of the free world. Like “freedom” and “terrorism”, the word “treason” has been so overused that we begin to forget its meaning; but one of the groups that HSBC gladly loaned money to is an organization that has financed Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda. These are people that American and British soldiers have died fighting against, and when a British bank was found colluding with them, the penalty was… a few weeks of profits, no personal responsibility, and not a single day of prison time. The settlement was in fact less than the profits gained from the criminal enterprise, so this wasn’t even a fine; it was a tax. Our response to treason was to impose a tax.

I do not think that capitalism is an irredeemable system. I think that, in themselves, free markets are very useful, and we should not remove or restrict them unnecessarily. But capitalism isn’t supposed to be a system where the rich can do whatever they want and the poor have to accept it. Capitalism is supposed to be a system where everyone is free to do as they choose, unless they are harming others—and the rules are supposed to be the same for everyone. A free market is not one where you can buy the right to take away other people’s freedom.

Is this just some utopian idealism? It would surely be utopian to imagine a world where fraud never happens, that much is true. Someone, somewhere, will always be defrauding someone else. But a world where fraud is punished most of the time? Where our most powerful institutions are still subject to the basic rule of law? Is that a pipe dream as well?

This is the second post in my ongoing series on financial fraud, but it’s also some useful personal financial advice. One of the most common forms of fraud, which I have experienced, and most Americans will experience at some point in their lives, is credit card fraud. The US leads the world in credit card fraud, accounting for 47% of all money stolen by this means. In most countries credit card fraud is declining, but not here.

The good news is that there are several things you can do to reduce both the probability of being victimized and the harm you will suffer if you are. I am of course not the first to make such recommendations; similar lists have been made by the Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, and even the FTC itself.

1. The first and simplest is to use fewer credit cards.

It is a good idea to have at least one credit card, because you can build a credit history this way which will help you get larger loans such as car loans and home loans later. The best thing to do is to use it for regular purchases and then pay it off as quickly as you can. The higher the interest rate, the more imperative it is to pay it quickly.

More credit cards means that you have more to keep track of, and more that can be stolen; it also generally means that you have larger total credit limits, which is a mixed blessing at best. You have more liquidity that way, to buy things you need; but you also have more temptation to buy things you don’t actually need, and more risk of losing a great deal should any of your cards be stolen.

2. Buy fewer things online, and always from reputable merchants.

This is one I certainly preach more than I practice; I probably buy as much online now as I do in person. It’s hard to beat the combination of higher convenience, wider selection, and lower prices. But buying online is the most likely way to have your credit card stolen (and it is certainly how mine was stolen a few years ago).

This is something you should be doing anyway. Online statements are available from just about every major bank and credit union, and you can check them at any time, any day. Watching these online statements will help you keep track of your spending, manage your budget, and, yes, protect against fraud, because the sooner you see and report a suspicious transaction the more likely you are to recover the money.

4. Use secure passwords, don’t re-use passwords, and use a secure password manager.

Most people still use remarkably insecure passwords for their online accounts. Hacking your online accounts —especially your online retail accounts, like Amazon—typically means being able to steal your credit cards. As we move into the cyberpunk future, personal security will increasingly be coextensive with online security, and until we find something better, that means good passwords.

Passwords should be long, complicated, and not easily tied to anything about you. To remember them, I highly recommend the following technique: Write a sentence of several words, and then convert the words of that sentence into letters and numbers. For example (obviously don’t use this particular example; the whole point is for passwords to be unique), the sentence “Passwords should be long, complicated, and not easily tied to anything about you.” could become the password “Psblcanet2aau”.

Human long-term memory is encoded in something very much like narrative, so you can make a password much more memorable by making it tell a story. (Literally a story if you like: “Once upon a time, in a land far away, there were seven dwarves who lived in a forest.” could form the password “1uatialfatw7dwliaf”.) If you used the whole words, it would be far too long to fit in most password systems; but by condensing it into letters, you keep it memorable while allowing it to fit. The first letters of English words are not quite random—some letters are much more common than others, for example—but as long as the password is long enough this doesn’t make it substantially easier to guess.

If you have any doubts about the security of your password, do the following: Generate a new password by the same method you used to generate that one, and then try the new password—not the old password—in an entropy checking utility such as https://howsecureismypassword.net/. The utility will tell you approximately how long it would take to guess your password by guessing random characters using current technology. This is really an upper limit—computers will get faster, and by knowing things about you, hackers can improve upon random guessing substantially—but a good password should at least be in the thousands or millions of years, while a very bad password (like the word “password” itself) can literally be in the nanoseconds. (Actually if you play around you can generate passwords that can take far longer, even “12 tredecillion years” and the like, but they are generally too long to actually use.) The reason not to use your actual password is that there is a chance, however remote, that it could be intercepted while you were doing the check. But by checking the method, you can ensure that you are generating passwords in an effective way.

After you’ve generated all these passwords, how do you remember them all? It’s unreasonable to expect you to keep them all in your head. Instead, you can just keep a few of the most important ones in your head, including a master password that you then use for a password manager like LastPass or Keeper. Password managers are frequently rated by sites like PC Mag, CNET, Consumer Affairs, and CSO. Get one that is free and top-rated; there’s no reason to pay when the free ones are just as good, and no excuse for getting any less than the best when the best ones are free.

The idea of a password manager makes some people uncomfortable—aren’t you handing your passwords over to someone else?—so let me explain it a little. You aren’t actually handing over your passwords, first of all; a reputable password manager will actually encrypt your passwords locally, and then only transmit encrypted versions of them to the site that operates the password manager. This means that no one—not the company, not even you—can access those passwords without knowing the master password, so definitely make sure you remember that master password.

In theory, it would be better to just remember different 27-character alphanumeric passwords for each site you use online. This is indisputable. Encryption isn’t perfect, and theoretically someone might be able to recover your passwords even from Keeper or LastPass. But that is astronomically unlikely, and what’s far more likely is that if you don’t use a password manager, you will forget your passwords, or re-use them and get them stolen, or else make them too simple and allow them to be guessed. A password manager allows you to maintain dozens of distinct, very complex passwords, and even update them regularly, all while remembering only one or a few. In practice, this is what provides the best security.

5. Above all, report any suspicious activity immediately.

This one I cannot emphasize enough. If you do nothing else, do this. If you ever have any reason to suspect that your credit card might have been compromised, call your bank immediately. Get them to cancel the card, send you a new one, and check any recent transactions.

Do thisif you lose your wallet. Do it if you see something weird on your online statement. Do it if you bought something from an online retailer that seemed a little sketchy. Do it if you just have a weird hunch and something doesn’t feel right. The cost of doing this is a minor inconvenience; the benefit could be thousands of dollars.

If you do report a stolen card, in most cases you won’t be held liable for a penny—the credit card company will have to cover any losses. But if you don’t, you could end up making payments on interest on a balance that a thief ran up on your behalf.

If we all do this, credit card fraud could become a thing of the past. Now, about those interest rates…

Jun 4, JDN 2457909
When most people think of “crime”, they probably imagine petty thieves, pickpockets, drug dealers, street thugs. In short, we think of crime as something poor people do. And certainly, that kind of crime is more visible, and typically easier to investigate and prosecute. It may be more traumatic to be victimized by it (though I’ll get back to that in a moment).

The statistics on this matter are some of the fuzziest I’ve ever come across, so estimates could be off by as much as an order of magnitude. But there is some reason to believe that, within most highly-developed countries, financial fraud may actually be more common than any other type of crime. It is definitely among the most common, and the only serious contenders for exceeding it are other forms of property crime such as petty theft and robbery.

Perhaps related to this psychological distance, we also generally have a sense that fraud is not as bad as violent crime. Even judges and juries often act as though white-collar criminals aren’t real criminals. Often the argument seems to be that the behavior involved in committing financial fraud is not so different, after all, from the behavior of for-profit business in general; are we not all out to make an easy buck?

But no, it is not the same. (And if it were, this would be more an indictment of capitalism than it is a justification for fraud. So this sort of argument makes a lot more sense coming from socialists than it does from capitalists.)

One of the central justifications for free markets lies in the assumption that all parties involved are free, autonomous individuals acting under conditions of informed consent. Under those conditions, it is indeed hard to see why we have a right to interfere, as long as no one else is being harmed. Even if I am acting entirely out of my own self-interest, as long as I represent myself honestly, it is hard to see what I could be doing that is morally wrong. But take that away, as fraud does, and the edifice collapses; there is no such thing as a “right to be deceived”. (Indeed, it is quite common for Libertarians to say they allow any activity “except by force or fraud”, never quite seeming to realize that without the force of government we would all be surrounded by unending and unstoppable fraud.)

Indeed, I would like to present to you for consideration the possibility that large-scale financial fraud is worse than most other forms of crime, that someone like Bernie Madoff should be viewed as on a par with a rapist or a murderer. (To its credit, our justice system agrees—Madoff was given the maximum sentence of 150 years in maximum security prison.)

Suppose you were given the following terrible choice: Either you will be physically assaulted and beaten until several bones are broken and you fall unconscious—or you will lose your home and all the money you put into it. If the choice were between death and losing your home, obviously, you’d lose your home. But when it is a question of injury, that decision isn’t so obvious to me. If there is a risk of being permanently disabled in some fashion—particularly mentally disabled, as I find that especially terrifying—then perhaps I accept losing my home. But if it’s just going to hurt a lot and I’ll eventually recover, I think I prefer the beating. (Of course, if you don’t have health insurance, recovering from a concussion and several broken bones might also mean losing your home—so in that case, the dilemma is a no-brainer.) So when someone commits financial fraud on the scale of hundreds of thousands of dollars, we should consider them as having done something morally comparable to beating someone until they have broken bones.

But now let’s scale things up. What if terrorist attacks, or acts of war by a foreign power, had destroyed over one million homes, killed tens of thousands of Americans by one way or another, and cut the wealth of the median American family in half? Would we not count that as one of the greatest acts of violence in our nation’s history? Would we not feel compelled to take some overwhelming response—even be tempted toward acts of brutal vengeance? Yet that is the scale of the damage done by the Great Recession—much, if not all, preventable if our regulatory agencies had not been asleep at the wheel, lulled into a false sense of security by the unending refrain of laissez-faire. Most of the harm was done by actions that weren’t illegal, yes; but some of actually was illegal (20% of direct losses are attributable to fraud), andmost of the rest should have been illegal but wasn’t. The repackaging and selling of worthless toxic assets as AAA bonds may not legally have been“fraud”, but morally I don’t see how it was different. With this in mind, the actions of our largest banks are not even comparable to murder—they are comparable to invasion or terrorism. No mere individual shooting here; this is mass murder.

I plan to make this a bit of a continuing series. I hope that by now I’ve at least convinced you that the problem of financial fraud is a large and important one; in later posts I’ll go into more detail about how it is done, who is doing it, and what perhaps can be done to stop them.

I know I’m going out on a limb here, but I think it would generally be a good thing if we based our tax system on the advice of Nobel Laureate economists. Joseph Stiglitz wrote a tax policy paper for the Roosevelt Institution last year that describes in detail how our tax system could be reformed to simultaneously restore economic growth, reduce income inequality, promote environmental sustainability, and in the long run even balance the budget. What’s more, he did the math (I suppose Nobel Laureate economists are known for that), and it looks like his plan would actually work.

The plan is good enough that I think it’s worth going through in some detail.

He opens by reminding us that our “debt crisis” is of our own making, the result of politicians (and voters) who don’t understand economics:

“But we should be clear that these crises – which have resulted in a government shutdown and a near default on the national debt – are not economic but political. The U.S. is not like Greece, unable to borrow to fund its debt and deficit. Indeed, the U.S. has been borrowing at negative real interest rates.”

Stiglitz pulls no punches against bad policies, and isn’t afraid to single out conservatives:

“We also show that some of the so-called reforms that conservatives propose would be counterproductive – they could simultaneously reduce growth and economic welfare and increase unemployment and inequality. It would be better to have no reform than these reforms.”

But the following statement was not said by Bernie Sanders, it was said by Joseph Stiglitz, who I will remind you one last time is a world-renowned Nobel Laureate economist:

“The weaknesses in the labor market are reflected in low wages and stagnating incomes. That helps explain why 95 percent of the increase in incomes in the three years after the recovery officially began went to the upper 1 percent. For most Americans, there has been no recovery.”

It was also Stiglitz who said this:

“The American Dream is, in reality, a myth. The U.S. has some of the worst inequality across generations (social mobility) among wealthy nations. The life prospects of a young American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in other advanced countries.”

But let’s get back to the actual tax plan Stiglitz is proposing. He is in favor of raising some taxes and lowering others, spending more on some things and less on other things. His basic strategy is actually quite simple: Raise taxes with low multipliers and cut taxes with high multipliers. Raise spending with high multipliers and cut spending with low multipliers.

“While in general taxes take money out of the system, and therefore have a deflationary bias, some taxes have a larger multiplier than others, i.e. lead to a greater reduction in aggregate demand per dollar of revenue raised. Taxes on the rich and superrich, who save a large fraction of their income, have the least adverse effect on aggregate demand. Taxes on lower income individuals have the most adverse effect on aggregate demand.”

“It is important to dispel a misunderstanding that one often hears from advocates of lower taxes for the rich and corporations, which contends that the rich are the job producers, and anything that reduces their income will reduce their ability and incentive to create jobs. First, at the current time, it is not lack of funds that is holding back investment. It is not even a weak and dysfunctional financial sector. America’s large corporations are sitting on more than $2 trillion in cash. What is holding back investment, especially by large corporations, is the lack of demand for their products.”

Stiglitz talks about two principles of taxation to follow:

First is the Generalized Henry George Principle, that we should focus taxes on things that are inelastic, meaning their supply isn’t likely to change much with the introduction of a tax. Henry George favored taxing land, which is quite inelastic indeed. The reason we do this is to reduce the economic distortions created by a tax; the goal is to collect revenue without changing the number of real products that are bought and sold. We need to raise revenue and we want to redistribute income, but we want to do it without creating unnecessary inefficiencies in the rest of the economy.

Second is the Generalized Polluter Pays Principle, that we should tax things that have negative externalities—effects on other people that are harmful. When a transaction causes harm to others who were not party to the transaction, we should tax that transaction in an amount equal to the harm that it would cause, and then use that revenue to offset the damage. In effect, if you hurt someone else, you should have to pay to clean up your own mess. This makes obvious moral sense, but it also makes good economic sense; taxing externalities can improve economic efficiency and actually make everyone better off. The obvious example is again pollution (the original Polluter Pays Principle), but there are plenty of other examples as well.

Stiglitz of course supports taxes on pollution and carbon emissions, which really should be a no-brainer. They aren’t just good for the environment, they would directly increase economic efficiency. The only reason we don’t have comprehensive pollution taxes (or something similar like cap-and-trade) is again the political pressure of right-wing interests.

Stiglitz focuses in particular on the externalities of the financial system, the boom-and-bust cycle of bubble, crisis, crash that has characterized so much of our banking system for generations. With a few exceptions, almost every major economic crisis has been preceded by some sort of breakdown of the financial system (and typically widespread fraud by the way). It is not much exaggeration to say that without Wall Street there would be no depressions. Externalities don’t get a whole lot bigger than that.

Stiglitz proposes a system of financial transaction taxes that are designed to create incentives against the most predatory practices in finance, especially the high-frequency trading in which computer algorithms steal money from the rest of the economy thousands of times per second. Even a 0.01% tax on each financial transaction would probably be enough to eliminate this particular activity.

He also suggests the implementation of “bonus taxes” which disincentivize paying bonuses, which could basically be as simple as removing the deductions placed during the Clinton administration (in a few years are we going to have to say “the first Clinton administration”?) that exempt “performance-based pay” from most forms of income tax. All pay is performance-based, or supposed to be. There should be no special exemption for bonuses and stock options.

Stiglitz also proposes a “bank rescue fund” which would be something like an expansion of the FDIC insurance that banks are already required to have, but designed as catastrophe insurance for the whole macroeconomy. Instead of needing bailed out from general government funds, banks would only be bailed out from a pool of insurance funds they paid in themselves. This could work, but honestly I think I’d rather reduce the moral hazard even more by saying that we will never again bail out banks directly, but instead bail out consumers and real businesses. This would probably save banks anyway (most people don’t default on debts if they can afford to pay them), and if it doesn’t, I don’t see why we should care. The only reason banks exist is to support the real economy; if we can support the real economy without them, they deserve to die. That basic fact seems to have been lost somewhere along the way, and we keep talking about how to save or stabilize the financial system as if it were valuable unto itself.

Stiglitz also proposes much stricter regulations on credit cards, which would require them to charge much lower transaction fees and also pay a portion of their transaction revenue in taxes. I think it’s fair to ask whether we need credit cards at all, or if there’s some alternative banking system that would allow people to make consumer purchases without paying 20% annual interest. (It seems like there ought to be, doesn’t it?)

Next Stiglitz gets to his proposal to reform the corporate income tax. Like many of us, he is sick of corporations like Apple and GE with ten and eleven-figure profits paying little or no taxes by exploiting a variety of loopholes. He points out some of the more egregious ones, like the “step up of basis at death” which allows inherited capital to avoid taxation (personally, I think both morally and economically the optimal inheritance tax rate is 100%!), as well as the various loopholes on offshore accounting which allow corporations to design and sell their products in the US, even manufacture them here, and pay taxes as if all their work were done in the Cayman Islands. He also points out that the argument that corporate taxes disincentivize investment is ridiculous, because most investment is financed by corporate bonds which are tax-deductible.

Stiglitz departs from most other economists in that he actually proposes raising the corporate tax rate itself. Most economists favor cutting the rate on paper, then closing the loopholes to ensure that the new rate is actually paid. Stiglitz says this is not enough, and we must both close the loopholes and increase the rate.

I’m actually not sure I agree with him on this; the incidence of corporate taxes is not very well-understood, and I think there’s a legitimate worry that taxing Apple will make iPhones more expensive without actually taking any money from Tim Cook. I think it would be better to get rid of the corporate tax entirely and then dramatically raise the marginal rates on personal income, including not only labor income but also all forms of capital income. Instead of taxing Apple hoping it will pass through to Tim Cook, I say we just tax Tim Cook. Directly tax his $4 million salary and $70 million in stock options.

Stiglitz does have an interesting proposal to introduce “rent-seeking” taxes that specifically apply to corporations which exercise monopoly or oligopoly power. If you can actually get this to work, it’s very clever; you could actually create a market incentive for corporations to support their own competition—and not in the sense of collusion but in the sense of actually trying to seek out more competitive markets in order to avoid the monopoly tax. Unfortunately, Stiglitz is a little vague on how we’d actually pull that off.

One thing I do agree with Stiglitz on is the use of refundable tax credits to support real investment. Instead of this weird business about not taxing dividends and capital gains in the hope that maybe somehow this will support real investment, we actually give tax credits specifically to companies that build factories or hire more workers.

Stiglitz also does a good job of elucidating the concept of “corporate welfare”, officially called “tax expenditures”, in which subsidies for corporations are basically hidden in the tax code as rebates or deductions. This is actually what Obama was talking about when he said “spending in the tax code”, (he did not invent the concept of tax expenditures), but since he didn’t explain himself well even Jon Stewart accused him of Orwellian Newspeak. Economically a refundable tax rebate of $10,000 is exactly the same thing as a subsidy of $10,000. There are some practical and psychological differences, but there are no real economic differences. If you’re still confused about tax expenditures, the Center for American Progress has a good policy memo on the subject.

Stiglitz also has some changes to make to the personal income tax, all of which I think are spot-on. First we increase the marginal rates, particularly at the very top. Next we equalize rates on all forms of income, including capital income. Next, we remove most, if not all, of the deductions that allow people to avoid paying the rate it says on paper. Finally, we dramatically simplify the tax code so that the majority of people can file a simplified return which basically just says, “This is my income. This is the tax rate for that income. This is what I owe.” You wouldn’t have to worry about itemizing your student loans or mortgage payments or whatever else; just tally up your income and look up your rate. As he points out, this would save a lot of people a lot of stress and also remove a lot of economic distortions.

He talks about how we can phase out the mortgage-interest deduction in particular, because it’s clearly inefficient and regressive but it’s politically popular and dropping it suddenly could lead to another crisis in housing prices.

Stiglitz has a deorbit for anyone who thinks capital income should not be taxed:

“There is, moreover, no justification for taxing those who work hard to earn a living at a higher rate than those who derive their income from speculation.”

By equalizing rates on labor and capital income, he estimates we could raise an additional $130 billion per year—just shy of what it would take to end world hunger. (Actually some estimates say it would be more than enough, others that it would be about half what we need. It’s definitely in the ballpark, however.)

Stiglitz actually proposes making a full deduction of gross household income at $100,000, meaning that the vast majority of Americans would pay no income tax at all. This is where he begins to lose me, because it necessarily means we aren’t going to raise enough revenue by income taxes alone.

He proposes to make up the shortfall by introducing a value-added tax, a VAT. I have to admit a lot of countries have these (including most of Europe) and seem to do all right with them; but I never understood why they are so popular among economists. They are basically sales taxes, and it’s very hard to make any kind of sales tax meaningfully progressive. In fact, they are typically regressive, because rich people spend a smaller proportion of their income than poor people do. Unless we specifically want to disincentivize buying things (and a depression is not the time to do that!), I don’t see why we would want to switch to a sales tax.

At the end of the paper Stiglitz talks about the vital difference between short-term spending cuts and long-term fiscal sustainability:

“Thus, policies that promote output and employment today also contribute to future growth – particularly if they lead to more investment. Thus, austerity measures that take the form of cutbacks in spending on infrastructure, technology, or education not only weaken the economy today, but weaken it in the future, both directly (through the obvious impacts, for example, on the capital stock) but also indirectly, through the diminution in human capital that arises out of employment or educational experience. […] Mindless “deficit fetishism” is likely to be counterproductive. It will weaken the economy and prove counterproductive to raising revenues because the main reason that we are in our current fiscal position is the weak economy.”

It amazes me how many people fail to grasp this. No one would say that paying for college is fiscally irresponsible, because we know that all that student debt will be repaid by your increased productivity and income later on; yet somehow people still think that government subsidies for education are fiscally irresponsible. No one would say that it is a waste of money for a research lab to buy new equipment in order to have a better chance at making new discoveries, yet somehow people still think it is a waste of money for the government to fund research. The most legitimate form of this argument is “crowding-out”, the notion that the increased government spending will be matched by an equal or greater decrease in private spending; but the evidence shows that many public goods—like education, research, and infrastructure—are currently underfunded, and if there is any crowding-out, it is much smaller than the gain produced by the government investment. Crowding-out is theoretically possible but empirically rare.

Above all, now is not the time to fret about deficits. Now is the time to fret about unemployment. We need to get more people working; we need to create jobs for those who are already seeking them, better jobs for those who have them but want more, and opportunities for people who have given up searching for work to keep trying. To do that, we need spending, and we will probably need deficits. That’s all right; once the economy is restored to full capacity then we can adjust our spending to balance the budget (or we may not even need to, if we devise taxes correctly).

Of course, I fear that most of these policies will fall upon deaf ears; but Stiglitz calls us to action:

“We can reform our tax system in ways that will strengthen the economy today, address current economic and social problems, and strengthen our economy for the future. The economic agenda is clear. The question is, will the vested interests which have played such a large role in creating the current distorted system continue to prevail? Do we have the political will to create a tax system that is fair and serves the interests of all Americans?”